If you're looking to avoid burnout, it helps to think of your profession as something entirely separately from your identity. I'm not an "aerospace engineer" or a "project manager", I am merely a man who plies the trades of engineering and project management during the day. That's the service I provide to society in exchange for food, fuel, land, tools, weapons, medicine, textiles, etc. (I don't think it's a fair trade but that's out of the scope of this discussion.) The parts of life that I actually consider meaningful parts of my identity occur outside of work and mostly revolve around my family, friends, religion, storytelling, and art.<p>This may kind of seem tautological, but I think adding the extra degree of mental separation (I am a man/woman who practices X profession vs. I am X profession) can help clear your head and open new life avenues to you. If you spend 8 years grinding for a graduate degree and enter into an obscenely competitive job market and find little success, it's easy to feel claustrophobic and like you've failed if you take a job outside your field. However if you think "for 8 years I performed statistics, writing, lecturing, and reading, and now in order to make my fortune I'll try another trade" you feel feel less indebted to your past self and make more clearheaded decisions about what to do in life.